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Friday, April 29, 2016

Ordinarily
cover copy is such a predictable element of a novel as to be rendered
mundane.Engaging this, superb that,
powerhouse here, magnum opus there, best yet, never before seen—a superlative salad.Not so with the Gollancz SF Collector’s
edition of Mindplayers (1987).“Has a
bite like a silk piranha,” is the one line by Bruce Sterling selected to
characterize the novel.Effectively
capturing Cadigan’s unique combination of stylistic rhythm and tone with an
acute integration of mind technology and human inclination, it’s an
accomplished debut novel that launched of the career of one of sf’s top
writers.

Almost
a plotless novel (more a developing scene), Mindplayers
is one of those stories that so delicately picks loose the strings of its
premise as to keep the pages steadily turning to see what it will become
next.Dynamic in setting and
possibility, Cadigan sustains the narrative through a variety of mind-bending
technologies in emotional, mental, and physical contexts.The core concept never allowed too far out of
sight, however, human interest remains the lightning rod grounding the novel in
reality.

Coming
across reviews of Dan Simmons’ 2011 Flashback
prior to reading the novel, I was struck by the number of times I came
across the sentiment “good book, except
for Simmons’ heavy right-wing views.”A lot of genre readers these days overly sensitive to the idea of what
constitutes an extreme conservative view, the repeated commentary added
intrigue to what the back cover synopsis promised to be a burning
thriller.(After all, don’t weapons
floating freely in society go hand in hand with action plots?How can it be so strange?)Having now finished the novel, I’m able to
comment myself.Is Simmons’ view an
extreme right wing one?Depends on
perspective…

Nick
Bottom lives in a flashback haze.The
drug allowing him to recollect complete memories of times with his now-dead wife,
he scrapes by on random private eye money, living in a cubbyhole in what was
once a Denver shopping mall.European
and North American political weaknesses having allowed the Middle East to take
power in the aftermath of nuclear war, most of the western world is now
controlled by a Grand Caliphate.Japan
reverting to feudal ways, the land of the rising sun controls the majority of
what is not in the Caliphate’s hands.And it’s the leader of one of their largest, most influential
corporations that calls Bottom to his office one day.His son’s murder still unsolved, he hopes
that Bottom, who was part of the original investigation, will be able to use
flashback to relive the investigation and turn up clues that may have been
missed.With promise of all the drug he
wants, Bottom readily accepts.It’s
going back through crime scene, however, that he gets a big surprise: peeking
over the hood of a car is his wife.Further revelations coming quickly thereafter, Bottom is dragged
in.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

The
musical/theater troupe is an uncommon trope of science fiction (despite such
noteworthy examples as Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentines Castle or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven).The
sleekness of spaceships and the void of space seem to leave little room for
singing, music, colorful troubadours and trilling sopranos.Taking the term literally, Jack Vance’s 1965 Space Opera bucks the trend and puts an
opera troupe through the rigors of inter-planetary travel—in highly amusing
fashion.

Among
other things, Vance is known for his singular voice.No, not singing voice, rather his
intentionally over-the-top baroque style that nods once or twice to P.G.
Woodehouse; a good portion of the enjoyment of reading Vance are the thrusts
and parries of dialogue.Space Opera featuring a pompous patron
of the arts at odds with a stuffy ship captain and sharp-tongued young woman,
the medium would seem an opportunity for Vance’s style to shine.It does.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

There
are many things we look to writers for—entertainment to education, impossible
imaginings to realistic character portrayals, exotic settings to empathetic
circumstances, escape to comfort.Whether it be hero or villain, victim or passerby, elite or quotidian, another
thing some readers look for is the experience of living inside someone else’s head,
and some of the most difficult heads to portray may be children’s.Requiring the perfect balance of naivete and
cleverness, only truly skilled writers capture the feel in believable
fashion.Long Island suburbia circa 1960
the setting, Jeffrey Ford’s The Shadow
Year (2008) presents a year in the life of a boy on the cusp of adolescence
that finds an author wonderfully capable of slipping inside the mind of a child.

Feeling
strongly autobiographical, The Shadow
Year is a nostalgic novel.World
history set aside in favor of personal details, however, the unnamed boy who
leads a the story offers no views to the Vietnam or Cold Wars happening in the
larger world, but can tell you the idiosyncrasies of the local ice cream man,
how to properly t.p. a house on Halloween night, what issues to consult your
sister on, who the most endearing pulp heroes are, what secret trails lead through
the patch of woods behind the house to the school, who the worst bullies are,
what triggers his mother’s anger, and a host of other information vital to the
average 12-13 year old boy.Snips and
snails and puppy dog’s tails, Ford perfectly captures the delights of growing up
in America’s Golden Age.(More on the
non-delights, later.)

Sunday, April 24, 2016

The
prism of fiction is shot through with many lines. There are lines on the edges that
touch few works—outliers that are highly unique.Others shoot through the middle, touching
upon a seemingly endless line of books and stories that feel extremely
similar.The prism refracts light such
that externally most stories appear different, but when when one looks closer
at the network of lines, commonalities presents themselves.Today I’ll be reviewing two books whose
surfaces appear radically different, but at heart are almost the same story:
Linda Nagata’s 2013 The Red: First Light
and Chris Wooding’s 2009 Retribution
Falls.

One
military sci-fi and the other steampunk, First
Light and Retribution Falls are
incomparable in broad terms of genre.Nagata’s novel tells of futuristic soldiers fitted out with armored
exoskeletons, fighting in wars they know not the reason for but who do their
duty, anyhow.That is, until one day a
squad member discovers that…Wooding’s
novel tells of a retro-tech planet wherein dirty deals are being had left and
right, and the crew of the pirate ship the Ketty
Jay seem always to be in the thick of them.Everything goes relatively smoothly for Captain Frey, that is, until he
gets an offer too good to refuse…

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Fractals
are the aesthetic that first comes to mind finishing Jonathan Lethem’s 1995 Amnesia Moon.The novel’s seemingly scattered pieces
consisting of something from the schizoid nature of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (but
presented in more abstract terms), the lucid dreams of Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (the continually
shifting flow of narrative), and the post-apocalyptic,
reality-slipping-under-foot of Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.From these pieces Lethem creates a blend of
his own that defies easy categorization.A psychedelic post-apocalyptic realist wish-wash on the surface,
hovering tantalizing just below seems an individual’s misgivings in modern life
worth the scrutiny.

Amnesia Moon is ostensibly the
story of Chaos, a loner living life in the western part of

a
post-apocalyptic US.The cause of the
apocalypse unknown (though there are some wild stabs), Chaos lives off dog food
and the teachings of a dreaming seer calling himself Kellog.His own dreams becoming more powerful and
disturbing, Chaos discovers that Kellog may not hold the sway he once did, and
with a local hairy mutant girl, starts driving toward Los Angeles, hoping to
find something more concrete to build a life on.Encountering all varieties of the bizarre in
what’s left of California, this proves an immense challenge.

Most
often referenced as the cyberpunk guy
due to his initial association and promotion of the sub-genre, few remember
Bruce Sterling is also the person who declared cyberpunk dead, and went on to
write in different modes and with differing aims.Craftily becoming one of the contemporary
generation of writers’ most subtle satirists, novels like Holy Fire and Distraction
nevertheless do not receive the same amount of backwards genre gaze as The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, or Islands in the Net.The subversiveness so
delicate as to fly under the radar of most media, 2009’s The Caryatids is another novel to add to Sterling’s stellar
portfolio of satire.

As
deadpan flat as Sterling has ever written, it would be easy to mistake The Caryatids as a ‘boring’ novel.Naturally, this would be to miss the
point.The story of four women, cloned
sisters bred to rule the world in fact, Sterling draws a bead on a couple of significant
topics through the offshoots of their lives.Vera is an idealist, specifically an environmental activist putting her
money where her mouth is and working to clean up a toxic waste area in Croatia
for a major global company called Acquis.Radmila is a Hollywood celebrity, or at least what counts for such in
2060, and is faced with some ‘serious’ decisions with regards to how her image
is used, and to what degree her family’s interests play a part for the second
major global player, the Dispensation.The third sister is something of a medical specialist, though political
butterfly also suits her.Letting the
winds of politics buffet her where they will—as long as she has time for love
and adventure along the way—she finds herself caught up in the interests of the
third major global player, the Chinese government.And the fourth sister, well, she’s best
introduced in the story.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Finding
a groove and sticking with it, Guy Gavriel Kay has been writing historical
fantasy with the same m.o. since the publication of A Song for Arbonne.Aside
from Ysabel, eight novels have
twisted history ever so slightly to tell a tale that didn’t happen but might
as well have given the verisimilitude. Drama reigning, the stories are plot and
character oriented, with love, honor, virtue, and the other hallmark themes of
opera front and center.Kay’s latest, Children of Earth and Sky (2016, Berkley Publishing Group),
does not find the needle jumping track.

Occurring
in the years following Kay’s earlier duology Sarantine Mosaic, Children of Earth and Sky is set in the
Eastern Mediterranean after the Osmanli have retaken Asharias.The Balkan peninsula falling smack in the
middle of Jaddite and Osmanli interests, the majority of the action occurs in
and around the country of Dubrova, and the religious and political intrigue
they are stuck in the middle of, not to mention generate on their own.Spies and assassins flowing freely, a handful
of characters ply the waters of fate doing what they think is best.A pirate woman has her loyalties tested, a
young artist is thrown into the thick of political tension by a commission he can’t
refuse, and a merchant must put his martial skills to use in a court
threatening to collapse around him—the starring characters among them. Their
fates spread out through the years and places, we don’t always get what we
want.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

I
admit to entering Nick Harkaway’s 2014 Tigerman
with some trepidation.For as enjoyable
as his first two novels The Gone-Away World
and Angelmaker are, the enjoyment is
namely found in the off-the-wall usage of the English language and gonzo
plotting.Little of sub-textual note,
the ninjas and clockwork devices, Mad Max truckers and nefarious world-takeover
schemes keep the stories pulp at heart, meaning each must be tackled rather
than eased into.Thus looking ahead to
his third novel, I had built up a store of energy to be ready to turn the first
page.It turns out preparation for Tigerman (2014) was unnecessary; it’s as
refined an offering as Harkaway has produced to date.

To
say Tigerman is the novel I’ve been
waiting for Harkaway to write would be to put too strong a spin on things.To say that it is his most focused, relevant
novel to date hits much closer to the point.The language less dynamic but still tugging at the reins, Tigerman is Graham Greene on
steroids.Delicately balancing
socio-political concerns with a story by turns warm-hearted and exciting,
Harkaway creates a superhero motif with his right hand while flipping it on its
head and examining it against a backdrop of post-colonialism with his left.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

I’ve
said it before, and I’ll say it again: Robert Sheckley is one of the real Big
Three from science fiction’s Silver Age.Heinlein or Asimov can take a seat, preferably both.Producing more sophisticated, intelligent
content, having a deeper focus on the human condition, and being a better
word-by-word, line-by-line writer than Asimov and a more universal humanist
than Heinlein, his novels, nevertheless, have gotten the short end of the stick
in terms of historical recognition.This
blog’s charter does not include beating a drum for overlooked books and
writers, but in exploring classic science fiction I certainly have come across
works bearing that second look.Sheckley’s brilliant debut Immortality,
Inc. (1959) is well worth a return visit.

Where
Asimov often prostrates himself to the possibilities of science and technology,
Sheckley lends a more skeptical eye.Dynamically satirical, Immortality,
Inc. looks at the pitfalls of life-eternal via time travel, all with a
witty eye to humanity’s virtues and vices.Thomas Blaine, rich yacht designer, is driving down the road one day
when an accident takes his life.His
last thoughts on mortality, it’s something of a surprise to wake up,
alive.His mind having been illegally
transported by the Rex Corporation a century into the future, he wakes
comfortably his mental self, only in a stranger’s body.But it’s out on the streets of 22nd century
New York that Blaine discovers just how slight the idea of death has become.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

There
are many who consider astronauts heroes of the modern age.Where Eric the Red, Christopher Columbus,
Marco Polo, and a variety of others are idolized for their exploration of wild
lands of yesteryear, most people today know the names of Buzz Aldrin and Neil
Armstrong (Michael Collins gets the short end of that mission’s stick for some
reason) as the first on the moon in the mid-20th century.Attempting (emphasis on ‘attempting’) to put
such feats in perspective for contemporary readers, Kristin Kathryn Rusch’s
“Recovering Apollo 8” (2007) is alternate history of the space variety.

The novella
has a premise that can only be described as strange. Taking one of NASA’s most
successful, heralded missions as its Jonbar point, the story flips the success
on its head such that it was a failure, and then sets a billionaire genius, one
Richard Johansenn, on its heels to recover the lost ship and the men presumed
dead inside.Seeming a setup for a
deconstruction of something, Rusch nevertheless plows ahead, telling her own
tale of relative heroism.

Monday, April 11, 2016

I recently received spam - sorry, a request - to review a debut novel. The byline read: "A THRILLER SET IN A SCI-FI WORLD FILLED WITH PLOT TWISTS, A FEMALE PROTAGANIST AND SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY." This was not sent by the author, rather their publicist, and so I don't know who to blame for the tragedy. Hard to believe this a real example of book publicity... Has it sunk so low? (For the record, the plot summary which followed was no less refined or enticing.) We can forgive the misspelling of 'protagonist.' We can ignore the oxymoron "sci-fi world.... scientific accuracy." And we can excuse the insult of intelligence that directly stating "female protaganist" is to would-be readers. It's the sum total which causes the head to drop in shame. For all the advances in publishing, for all the familiarity readers have with the system and its attempts to manipulate for gain, for the mass of media supporting the book industry, and for all the university courses and online material available how to build your brand, how to market your material, how to properly use social media, blah blah blah, I'm left wondering: that is the "hook" a publicist is throwing my way? I'm not indignant; I'm sad at the reflection.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

WithWinter in Eden ending as it did, what
the third and final book in the Eden series, Return to Eden (1988), would hold in store was a major question
mark.If something resembling an
understanding had been established between the humans and yilane, what could
drive the Eden storyline further?Turns
out, a lot.

Kerrick,
having bartered a relative peace between the yilane and humans, looks to
re-settle with his wife Armun and the rest of the tanu in a new community.They do so beside a bountiful lake, but not
without a moment of intense drama for the two male yilane who travel with them.
Leading to other major events, life is
far from settled for the tanu.Ambalasi,
still de facto leader of the
Daughters of Life, has her traditional mindset put to the test by Enge and one
of the strong-willed Daughters, and in the process their whole community is
tested.And Vainte, exiled to a foreign
continent, contemplates her future, and eventually comes to a conclusion—a
predictable but effective conclusion.

Where
Winter in Eden expanded the settings
and characters of West of Eden, so
too does Return to Eden.But what is expanded, or at least concretized
most significantly is theme—or rather themes, as there are many floating around
Harrison’s extreme alternate history.From race/species relations to the role of weapons, perennial philosophy
to Otherness, linguistics to culture—all arrive at a relative sense of closure
given the points causing tension thus far in the series.The number of times I thought to myself “Wow, that ties back into that, and that…” is
a significant indication of the preparation and organization Harrison brought
to the series.

Alternate
history to the extreme, Harry Harrison’s West of Eden, first in the Eden trilogy, posited a world wherein not all
dinosaurs went extinct.An evolved
bipedal species surviving the Cretaceous and gaining sentience called the
yilane, the novel describes their first major interaction with humanity, and
the war and violence that ensued.More
than just blood and fighting, it is clear Harrison was paving the way for a
larger agenda on species relations, Otherness, war, civilization, and other
major ideas surrounding the concpt of a multi-hued society.In the second of the trilogy, Winter in Eden, those ideas begin to
reveal themselves along clearer lines, even as the tension between the yilane
and humans ratchets itself back up again.

Exploring
new areas of the map, Winter in Eden
likewise expands its points of view.Just a side character in West of Eden, Winter begins to follow Armun, Kerrick’s wife, as she attempts to
reunite with her husband.Kerrick,
meanwhile, attempts to extract what knowledge and science he can from the ruins
of the yilane city razed at the end of West of Eden.But a stronger calling
eventually draws him away.Though
defeated, Vainte still lives, and in Winter
in Eden her quest to destroy the vile ustouzou
redoubles.Employing means to make
Hitler smile, she’s learned her lesson and aims for a methodical killing
blow.Likewise surviving the catastrophe
is Enge, one of the Daughters of Light.Her beliefs shunned by most yilane, she strikes out with a small group
to create a new society, and discovers some very interesting aspects of the
world in the process.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Tim Powers is a writer whose development the reader has been
able to track with certainty.A marked maturation
is visible from his fledgling, early efforts that won over more for ideas than
execution to his latest efforts which feature a writer aware and in control of the
craft.2016 a more productive year than
usual for Powers, it has seen the publication of a major novel, Medusa’s Web, and in June the novella Down and Out in Purgatory (Subterranean).

Tom Holbrook is on a mission of revenge.The love of his life killed by her husband (a
man Holbrook was formerly close with, so close they had tattoos done together),
he scours the American West searching, gun at hand.A hardened man with purpose, when he finds the
object of his revenge in a morgue, a wrench is thrown in the works.But only temporarily.Other, more rash means possible, revenge is still
attainable for Holbrook, just not in this world, it seems.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Just what science fiction and fantasy needed: another celebration of mediocrity - sorry, fan-voted best science fiction and fantasy novel!!! Thanks Dragon Con for dragging the bar a little lower! (And thank you to whomever I stole the image on the right from: it fits perfectly.)

Tanith Lee is quietly one of the great writers of dark fantasy,
and though now passed, still deserving of a wider audience.Walking her own path in a field filled with wannabes, she slowly but steadily built an oeuvre of stories grounded in
rich prose, a sensitivity to the workings of the human soul (ill-intentioned,
good-hearted, or otherwise), a deep understanding of the power of myth and
faery, and a talent for synergizing it all in fascinating stories.1988’s The
Book of the Damned (reprinted by Open
Road Media in 2016) is the first in a series of works examining the
phantasmagorical depths of the decadent, haunted city Paradys.It remains one of not only Lee’s, but
fantasy’s best works.

Presented as stories from a strange city (the subtitle is The Secret Books of Paradys), The Book of the Damned is ostensibly
three novellas: “Stained with Crimson,” “Malice in Saffron,” and “Empires of
Azure.” Like Lee’s earlier Flat Earth
books, however, the tales bleed and seep into one another to create a whole, of
sorts.Distinct yet suffuse entities,
the characters and stories at each’s core takes one step further toward
building in the reader’s mind the city of Paradys.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

The
best works of a sub-genre are most often those which come to light in
hindsight.Unaware they were/are part of
a groundswell, there is no overt implementation of particular tropes or themes
in order to be part of a specific literary or cultural movement.Steampunk stories, for example, while billowing
in popularity after 2009-2010, have not since seen as many truly unique works
as the decades prior.The best novels
and stories produced before it became a cultural phenomenon, James Blaylock’s Homunculus (1986) is one such novel, and
indeed one of the sub-genre’s charming, capering, and unwitting cornerstones.

A
strange dirigible circling the rainy gray skies of England, the inventor
Langdon St. Ives works oblivious on his space rocket at the outset of Homunculus.But a late night burglary attempt on a
perpetual motion device brings St. Ives closer to the gyres of the dirigible’s
haunting significance.Snagging him and
dragging him into the proverbial machine, however, is his possession of the
memoirs of Sebastien Owlesby and its account of a magical little man trapped in
a box.With the dirigible’s orbit
decaying toward London, it isn’t long before it’s up to St. Ives and his Royal
Society fellows to attempt to bring down a scheme that no one seem to have a
firm handle on, right down to the very men perpetuating the scheme.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

After
opening his career in science fiction with the original Fall Revolution series, Ken Macleod has since been going through
the genre’s major tropes and conceptions to find inspiration.The Engines
of Light trilogy hard sf meets space opera and Newton’s Wake full blown space opera, for his next novel Learning the World (2005) Macleod
decided to go the first contact route.

A
dual-perspective novel, the actual contact between humanity and a bat-like
alien species comes very late in the novel.Humanity interestingly the species technically advanced enough to do the
contacting, Learning the World
oscillates back and forth between characters in a generation starship
approaching a new system and the aliens who inhabit one of the planets in the
system as the two notice signs of the other before actual contact.The aliens having a WWII level of technology,
first contact technically (ha!) occurs when the aliens notice a new “star”
moving through their night sky.Other
strange, unnatural things popping up in their atmosphere and environment, they
quickly figure out they are not alone.Meanwhile on the ship, factions appear once humanity observes likfe on
the planet and likewise figures out it is not alone.The main draw of Learning the World is thus the manner in which each side learns
about the other and the relative effect it has on their societies.

Good ol'
clichés.In fiction they can be A)
beaten like a dead horse, B) expanded upon to transcend origin, C)
deconstructed for critical value, or D) given enough depth to stand on their
own—legs tottering from the years of accumulated weight, but standing
nonetheless.Another way of putting
this, B, C, and/or D are needed to avoid A.George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream
(1982) goes with tactic D, but it remains up to the reader whether its legs
collapse.

The
offer seeming too good to be true, at the outset of Fevre Dream Captain Abner Marsh approaches his midnight dinner with
the mysterious Joshua York with strong reserve.Marsh’s fleet of steamboats having recently been destroyed in winter’s
ice, he has little of value, and is wary of the massive sum he is offered to
captain a steamboat, no questions to be asked.When Marsh learns the full incentive of the offer, however, he jumps on
it—a dream truly come true.A time
later, Marsh finds himself happily plying the waters of the Mississippi once
again.But more questions remain.York confines himself to his stateroom during
the day, has a bizarre obsession with unsolved murders along the river, and his
companions are a little long in the tooth—literally.Little does Marsh know just how much stranger
his life on the river is about to become.